I'm a young American woman in Milan...and you're not. I go to La Scala a lot...and you don't.

June 2011

June 30, 2011

Even in a city like Milan that embraces style and fashion so eagerly, not many piano soloists would have the ballz to show up for their concerts with fashion-forward accessories. Italians also take their great composers and musical legacies quite seriously -- you just need to spend a particularly thorny night in La Scala's boo-heaving loggione to understand the passion and the blood-sport that classical music can quickly become. So only a pianist as cool, practiced, and prepared as Giuseppe Albanese could do it with such finesse -- the young Italian pianist took the stage on a sweltering Sunday night at Milan's Teatro degli Arcimboldi in bright red Versace shoes sourced at the Via Montenapoleone Versace boutique...we always melt at even the smallest sythesis of classical music and fashion.

Read all about it here (in Italian, guys!) although OC will be adding Albanese's quotes in English when she gets back from Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's sweetly-campy L'Italiana in Algeri premiere tonight at Teatro alla Scala because what he said in an interview to OC for Grazia.it pretty much rocked -- like how only Liszt can rock a block party 'til our hair turns gray.

Marcus Farnsworth, 27, has a hard double act coming up this month, simultaneously rehearsing for both Bach’s sublime solo cantata Ich habe genug and the role of the violent East End punk Eddy in Greek, Mark Anthony Turnage’s abrasive updated version of the Oedipus story.

A free performance of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony will be held at Avery Fisher Hall with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and mezzo Michelle DeYoung. The September 10th evening concert will be broadcast on the radio and on screens in Lincoln Center Plaza.

We only hope that seats will first go to those who were involved directly in the aftermath of the trauma of September 11.

June 27, 2011

Opera Chic has the utmost respect for the men and women who have the gift of creating music that, however popular and simple, is so catchy and effective you can't really forget it, even after decades (one of our talented conductors, Nicola Luisotti, likes to point out that if Beethoven were alive today he would also compose film scores because movie scores are all about effective story-telling with musical means).

It's sad to learn of the passing of a composer of, well, immortal TV themes such as the one for "Perry Mason".

Composer Fred Steiner, who wrote the themes for "Perry Mason" and "Rocky and Bullwinkle" and who later became a respected film-music historian and musicologist, died of natural causes Thursday at his home in Ajijic, Mexico. He was 88.

Steiner was Oscar nominated for his contributions to Quincy Jones' 1985 score for "The Color Purple." He also scored, on his own, a handful of features including "Man From Del Rio," "Time Limit," "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre" and "The Sea Gypsies." But it was in television where Steiner made an enduring mark, with memorable scores for seven early-1960s episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and a dozen scores for the original "Star Trek" including such now-classic episodes as "Charlie X," "The Corbomite Maneuver" and "Balance of Terror."

And also:

Steiner's 1974 essay on Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho" was the earliest known musicological analysis of a film score, and he earned a Ph.D. in 1981 after writing a dissertation on the life and music of Alfred Newman -- believed to be the first about a film composer to result in a doctorate in musicology in America.

He chose "Benvenuto Cellini" or, better yet, "Benvenuto Cellini" chose him. TG says he's listening to the Berlioz opera all the time and feels he's this close to the right idea to stage it:

"These days, I listen to 'Benvenuto Cellini', also by Berlioz, all the time, and I just know I'm this close to the right idea to stage this extremely complex opera. But something's still missing and I know it will all come together when I don't expect it, when I'm doing something else, because that's how it works for me: the more I get anxious the more the ideas seem to elude me. I literally lose sleep over this, but the ideas come like this, like an epifania (ed- in Italian) -- that's how they manifest themselves to me.

June 21, 2011

During the scramble of Men's Fashion Week, we'll leave you with some Alagna salve -- he's magic! Here's Roberto from Opéra Marseilles where he's currently singing Rodrigue in Massenet's Le Cid through June 26 with the Marseille Philharmonic Orchestra and Jacques Lacombe.

June 19, 2011

OC just returned to Milan from a whirlwind, Northern Lights-trippingly fabulous adventure in St. Petersburg and you didn't -- unless you did -- then we must have toasted beguilingly over glasses of champagne and checked out an ethereal Verdi's Requiem starring Valery Gergiev and this year's young Russian winners of the Montblanc New Voices at the Stars of the White Nights 2011 concert with booming bass Mikhail Petrenko and lyric tenor Sergei Semishkur.

Montblanc's new Haute Joaillerie collection, launched to celebrate the event, competed with the radiance of the Northern Lights that bathe the city during June with an almost 24-hour glow (the photo above OC took on a boat ride around 1am), but a steady flow of dark Russian teas kept us in top form and we'll report back to you with the events. It's well worth the wait as we continue to cocktail-hop our way through Men's Fashion Week, which has just touched-down in Milan and continues for the next couple days. So a 24-hour party welcomes us back from a 24-hour party, and really, what could be better to cure our champagne and caviar hangovers than flourishing cocktails with an international swell of hot, young male models?

It's only fitting that in a city as cool as San Francisco you'd have an opera super who devotes his off-stage career to even cooler things. Putting the super into super, San Francisco Opera Supernumerary John Martin shares his intimate portraits of the SFO's Wagner Ring headliners, currently running at the War Memorial Opera House.

San Francisco Opera's Ring Cycle opened a couple weeks ago on May 29th with Siegfried, followed by Götterdämmerung. Last night, Das Rheingold premiered to be followed-up by tonight's Die Walküre, one of the Ring operas that we have a sweet spot for.

Donald Runnicles conducts the Francesca Zambello production, in co-production with Washington National Opera. Brünnhilde is sung by Nina Stemme, Wotan by Mark Delavan, Sieglinde by Anja Kampe, and Siegmund by Brandon Jovanovich.

June 11, 2011

If you happen to catch the awesomely cheeky, effortlessly chic creative director of Moschino, Rossella Jardini, strolling down via della Spiga or in the basement of piazza Cinque Giornate Coin's Eataly, stocking-up on sweet glass pots of bio yogurt and sparkling Lurisia water, make sure to thank her for collaborating with the English National Ballet's fundraiser.

June 10, 2011

Out of the 350 travelling members of The Metropolitan Opera (which includes singers, orchestra, chorus, ballet, and staff) it's Diana Damrau’s eight-month-old son Alexander that is the biggest star of the company's current Japan tour. The New York City opera company touched down in Japan on May 30 for three weeks of concerts and operas (Lucia di Lammermoor, La Bohème, and Don Carlo) from June 4 - 19 in Tokyo and Nagoya. It's The Met's seventh Japan tour, and this year is chaperoned by Italian conducting super-powers Fabio Luisi and Gianandrea Noseda.

Soprano Marina Poplavskaya, tenor Marcelo Álvarez, tenor Rolando Villazón, and tenor Alexey Dolgov all came to the resque of the casting department when Anna Netrebko and Joseph Calleja pulled out of the tour at the last minute, citing radiation fears despite the all-clear from a team of scientists.

This afternoon between rainstorms at Teatro alla Scala in Rodotto Toscanini under the bemused, bronzed bust of Giacomo Puccini, La Scala Intendant Stéphane Lissner and Chairman/Prez of Tod's Diego Della Valle were in high spirits for good reason: the lux, Italian moccasin-maker pledged 5.2 million euros (almost $8 million freedom bux) to back La Scala's cultural and youth initiatives, gaining permanent donor status up there with La Scala's eight current, corporate sponsors.

Tod's initiatives are far from the cultural fringe, having recently poured 25 million euros to help restore Rome's crumbling, pollution-stained Colosseum. Della Valle finds it a moral obligation to support his fellow Italian landmarks and institutions, but mostly it's a positive sign for an opera house that has struggled to find donors in the past.

It's not the first time the two Italian heavyweights have collaborated. Back in September 2010 during Women's Fashion Week, Tod's hosted a Milan cocktail to toast the marriage of Made in Italy luxury with Made in Italy culture. "An Italian Dream" was a 5-minute, tightly-choreographed commercial that featured La Scala's corpo di ballo wearing Tod's new suede (ballet-inspired) shoes. Opera Chic was there!

His art doesn’t belong exclusively to the operatic cognoscenti: like his great predecessors Caruso, Gigli, Lanza and Björling, he had what used to be called “the common touch” – a simple generosity and open charm that appealed to anyone with music in their heart.

Let’s not be sentimental about this. Pavarotti didn’t have all the gifts. Nobody could pretend he was a great actor, nor was he the most subtle of interpreters. He lacked Domingo’s incredible versatility and intelligence. I would even say that for sheer beauty of sound, his voice doesn’t match either that of the young Giuseppe di Stefano or the young José Carreras.

But Pavarotti was a natural, with a genius for the music of his native Italy. To the elegant bel canto of Bellini and Donizetti, the high romantic operas of Verdi, the lush melancholy melodies of Puccini or the insouciance of Neapolitan song, he brought a voice of perfect focus and clarion purity, crisply and effortlessly articulated. There’s no effort in his singing at its best; there is only joy, and a sense of it being the easiest thing in the world (which it certainly isn’t).

But we'll clue you in: Last week, OC was partying in Hamburg (no, not at Thessa's Facebook party!) with Montblanc for a black tie dinner to toast the city's art scene. It was held in the industrial, steel and glass exhibition space of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg where Montblanc fêted one of its twelve winners of this year's Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award.

Keep reading the party report, including a private concert from Lang Lang!